Sure, after I finished with the Academy I looked around the lake area surrounding it for a ruins I had seemingly missed as the guy in the roundtable place told me that a lady in a cave to the west of it would have half a medallion that I’d likely want. Me being me I accidentally explored the east side of said lake instead and came across a lady named Rya who said her necklace was stolen from her. I got said necklace back, brought it back to her, there was some conversation options where I answered “yes, that sounds nice” as I almost always do. Once I got up to the plateau area she was hanging out outside a different set of ruins next to a site of grace, she said she’d take me to see people and extended her hand. I accepted it as again my answer to almost everything is “sure, why not?” and I was warped inside the manor right in front of the lass from the loading screen.
All that said (big volcano manor spoilers here) While I agreed to join them and met a whole bunch of… let’s say interesting characters and got an assassination contract, I kinda kept exploring around the manor beyond the Godskin Noble fellow, found the great lord Rykard, killed the great lord Rykard (I smiled when I realized exactly what gimmick this was gonna be, although IMO this was the hardest/iffiest version of it From has yet crafted) which seems like it likely blew up several side quests. Multiple characters disappeared, others say they are leaving and the manor is done, heck when I googled Rya’s name to double check what it was I discovered I apparently missed 75% of her questline that I didn’t even know was a thing. TBF I don’t know that I’ve have done many of them as I only google questline stuff when I am faced with a choice that seems like it could have potential big implications I am unaware of so I assume I’ve missed most of them so far, but yeah beating that boss was a major slamming of the book closed on that particular chapter in a way that was impossible to miss.
So anyways I’ve moved on to exploring where the path takes me, which currently seems to be leading me into the mountains. I actually have no idea how to get from where I am to back where I had warped from so I’d guess there’s a big stretch of game/land I kinda skipped over, I assume at some point I’ll figure it out.
TBF my Elden Ring tales often slide just a bit towards stream of consciousness ramblings so I’m more impressed when anyone actually tracks most of what I just typed out. That and I remember no names >_>
So whenever I quit out of the game before (which I did every time before going into rest mode as that would kick me anyways) it went straight to the title screen, but this last time I did it it brought up the Namco and From screens before getting back to said title screen. If this wasn’t a one-time quirk and they legit patched the game to make sure you see their names each time you quit the game that’s rather bullshit IMO.
Anyways in trying to progress forward from the Volcano Manor I seemingly instead wandered backwards back to where I had initially warped there from so… I guess I can get back to all that exloration around here I missed the first go around. Before I did this I stumbled upon the full-grown fallingstar beast and… I could probably beat it as on horseback I can evade most of its attacks but I do so little damage to it that it’d take a good long while to pull it off, so that’s gonna be my first true “come back to this later” boss I’ve stumbled across in quite a while.
I was going to post about how I figured out why Elden Ring isn’t my favorite Souls game despite it being so fun: it breaks the illusion too much. Demons Souls is played incredibly straight with the lore being fertile ground that grew the gamey stuff. Elden Ring… just has the gamey stuff. There’s no fantasy simulationism. It’s just fantasy fantasy. It’s like the Disney World of Souls games, and that’s fine for some people, I guess…
Was exploring around a bit, found a giant staircase that lead to a massive door that opened into a capital or capital-adjacent area and went “this feels progressively later game, I should probably double back to Caelid before exploring too much here”, but noticed that this area of the map is like a rugged map I found ages ago, but in going to explore that I found another warp thing so there goes every plan again. I only mention it as there’s a ton of windmills around here and the amount of Don Quixote messages on the ground brings a tear to my eye. Anyways that eventually lead me to a different entrance to the area I had just left, but I could get to the location shown in the map but right past it there was a tower/lift guarded by a boss-type creature and…
…and this is why none of my short term plans in this game ever come to fruition. Also I’m like 85 hours into the game now and I still haven’t found a great club, I don’t know if them hiding it in a late game area would be worse than having simply accidentally walked past it dozens of hours ago.
One of the reasons I turned off the game was the thought of replaying it with goals and just the sure breathe of missing something without a walkthrough right in front of me.
Yeah, this stuff is always daunting for me but sometimes you just gotta dive in take it as it comes.
A couple quest lines seem to be permanently broken for me anyway because they were broken at launch and I seem to be too far in now for the patches since to have fixed them for me. So I’m just rolling with it.
I think the only From game I ever replayed was Demon’s, and that was years later just to answer my own personal “this game totally holds up after these later Dark Souls games, right?”, plus get to it once more before the servers went down. I couldn’t even imagine replaying a massive open world game less than a decade or so after the fact.
Anyways when I went to look up info on a weapon I picked up to answer an upgrading question (I just wanted to know how many stones it would take to upgrade it to a certain level; I never actually found the answer) I was struck by the realization that I never even considered that these colossal weapons can have notably different reaches, and apparently my beloved club would have somewhat shorter reach than what I’ve been rocking for the past… 75 or so hours. I may simply just be pot committed to this weapon at this point.
In less existential game thoughts I finally found my way to that castle down in a ravine in the middle of the plateau area. I’m not sure I found the intended way down there as I think I just managed to find a tint place where the fall down there didn’t result in death, but I lived so it counts.
Two minutes short of 89 hours I finally found my beloved great club, twas a boss drop in a cave-type thing. I found it fair BTW, didn’t look up where it was or anything!
…That said this is very much a thing. I upgraded my great club a good bit so that it is maybe a touch stronger than my upgraded Watchdog Staff, and the range seems maybe a touch shorter but fairly close… but the R2 strike seems much worse. I’m rolling with it now to see how I like it but the R2 attack is basically putting the club straight up and dropping it down in a perfectly straight line; the watchdog staff instead is a like wide half-circle swipe that can more easily hit multiple enemies or catch an enemy when my aim is a touch off. Apparently the “proper” way to use these weapons is to just use jump attacks whenever possible which would make them both control about the same, but I mainly stay ground based (good to keep in the back of my mind at least though). I think I’ll just upgrade both of them and if the power of one starts to outstrip the other just go with that one (they use different stones thankfully), but all else being equal if after giving this great club a bit more time it doesn’t click a bit more I might end up having the bench it after all that build up.
So I got back to Caelid, found a warp thing that sent me right to castle redmane and… okay, question: Is Radahn supposed to get just utterly stomped the fuck out like that or did I without cheating like trigger easy mode on him? I think I summoned a mini-army to swarm him and once I got past the initial archery from afar stuff I hopped onto my horse, I think summoned another fellow or two and he just got taken apart from all sides. I still thought it was pretty neat and I managed to die once as his “coming down from the heavens like an asteroid” attack took out an entirely full health bar but generally the great bosses are like moderately tricky.
I also went back into the caelid tower and managed to take out the godskin apostle in there, although that was a much harder fight that took a good number of attempts. Now… well something happened recently and a NPC said that something somewhere might be a “final challenge” so I guess I’ll just avoid that specific place for a bit, still gotta go mess around in a capital and such.
Well, they did a pretty big nerf to Radahn a month in.
Also, at the time I beat pre-nerf Radahn, hitting Godskin Apostle scratched him for like 1% of his health bar so I put him off till later. So if you were able to beat the apostle at all, it sounds like your weapon was overleveled for Radahn.
Although if you let the summons do all the work then I guess it’s mostly the nerf. The summons used to be more useful to draw Radahn’s attacks away from you, they didn’t do a great deal of damage on their own before.
Ah, someone else mentioned he got nerfed hard so I guess that would explain it. Still works as a neat gimmick battle though!
I actually did the tower basement Apostle almost immediately after the Radahn fight and that one was much harder. I actually used those ash summon things (the five poison flowers one which didn’t seem to actually harm him) and my weapon art or whatever it’s called (pressing L2 when two-handing the weapon triggers it) for the first times to try and tip the balance in my favor. Took a dozen or so attempts but I finally managed to best him, fortunately it doesn’t take a ton of damage to stun him for a critical hit but actually getting it without being torn to shreds is tricky.
I’ve wrapped up most of the Caelid loose ends I could remember, all the boss-level enemies here drop a ton of runes and are still fairly tricky to take on. That big guy outside the deathroot fellow’s place is a menace.
Oh yeah, for a brief second I tried dual wielding my watchdog staff and great club at the same time. I’m not sure there was much in the way of benefit (all I could figure out was pressing L1 made me swing both together) but it looked pretty funny so not a complete loss.
